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One of the great things about ÜberConference is that you can see who’s on the conference call and who’s talking at any given moment. For instance, the person speaking during your call shows up at the top. Being able to see both who is invited and who has already joined helps kick off the call smoothly by avoiding extra rounds of “Who’s here?” and “Who are we waiting for?” You don’t have to wonder who said what.

We’ve had this unique visual dimension since our launch. Starting today you can also get your own permanent conference URL. When you log into ÜberConference you will see your ÜberConference URL on your dashboard. It will be a number by default, but you can customize it to be your name or whatever you like. This way it’s easier to remember and share.

Just click the “Customize your URL” link and add the text you’d like to have at the end of the link, like uberconference.com/u/myname

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ” –Aristotle, “The Politics”

When you sit down and think about it, many of the greatest accomplishments of the human race are collaborative efforts. The cathedrals of medieval France. MGM musicals like “Singing in the Rain” or “Royal Wedding”. Democracy. The Renaissance. A double double cheeseburger with fries from In ‘N Out Burger.

These are things that could only have been created by a group effort – human beings working together.

Why? Because we are, as Aristotle observed more than 2,300 years ago, social animals. We live a common life together.

So if we live a common life together and are, at heart, social animals; why do so many teleconferences not work? What, exactly, causes them to be disappointing? I think I can confidently state that it is not because we are either beasts nor gods.

What causes many teleconferences to fail is a combination of inefficient technology and basic human politeness. These are what I call “the pain points of teleconferencing.” And they are solvable problems.

1. Set an agenda. Stick to it.

Unless the teleconference is between NFL owners, nobody gets to talk about the Super Bowl.

Before your next teleconference, send out an agenda to everyone. These are the items we will be discussing, and this is the order in which we’ll be discussing them. People are busy, and while your teleconference may in fact be the most important part of their work day, it is not the only part of their work day. Nothing kills a teleconference quicker than desultory talk about the weather, the latest flu outbreak or last night’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy. We all have other things to do today besides chit-chat right now. Stay on point, stick to the agenda, finish the call.

2. People are going to arrive late. Deal with it.

It’s just going to happen: people are going to show up late. They’ll have a million good reasons. We don’t need to hear them. We also don’t need to recap what’s been discussed already.

Think of it this way: somebody shows up late to Mass. The priest doesn’t stop the proceedings, introduce everyone, and then recap what’s happened so far. No. If you show up late, you check where in the liturgy (agenda) we are, listen in and catch up on your own.

There’s no reason a teleconference can’t operate that way either.

3. Use technology that works.

Teleconferencing technology should do the following:

— allow automatic sharing of documents during the call

— visual identification of who is speaking and participating

— late entrants can join without interrupting — or stopping — the call

If your teleconferencing system can’t do these things, your calls are going to be less effective, more painful for the callers, and, ultimately less collaborative.

We’re human beings. We’re social animals. We’re working on a problem together. Any technology you are using that disrupts collaborative work is anti-social and goes counter to who we are in our essence.

Productivity consultant and founder of Custom Living Solutions, Joshua Zerkel, is also the SF ambassador for Evernote. Let’s just crown him the guy who really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to organizing data and being super efficient at anything to do with sharing in the cloud. Our Social Media Manager, Sarah Buhr, sat down to ask him a few of his great secrets for getting sh*% done.

Tips:

Integrate UberConference with Evernote – When you integrate UberConference with Evernote, you have the option of sending any recorded call and notes to their Evernote account. Very helpful for journalists and writers or anyone who needs to save their conversations for later. Integrate with Evernote here.

Utilize the Cloud – Think about how your data follows you around. Evernote allows you to keep all your files and other data in one central place so you can work from anywhere.

Label your Evernote folders by topic and client to stay organized – You can collaborate with specific people easier if you separate everything out first.

You can actually email notes into Evernote – Secret tip from Josh is that every Evernote user actually gets their own Evernote email. Go into your account settings to see it. Then if you use the @ in the subject line you can specify which notebook you want that info to go to. You can also use the # symbol to tag whatever you want it to follow as well. Use this for receipts, events, really anything that goes into your email.

Want to share a presentation during a conference call? Or a meeting agenda for people to follow? ÜberConference now makes it simple for you or anyone in your conference call to share notes, documents, and files with everyone else on the call. For free. See how it works:

Creating an intuitive document management system takes smart thinking, and companies like Box and Evernote do a great job with these core features and more. Which is why we’re happy to announce that ÜberConference has integrated with Box and Evernote to bring integrated document sharing to all conference calls. Just link your Box or Evernote account to your ÜberConference account and choose which files to share.

When you share items during a call, we add a thumbnail of the document to the ÜberConference and all participants can access it by clicking on it. Each participant’s view is independent, so different people can view different files at the same time. At the end of the call, links to the notes and files are included in the call summaries for easy reference.

Box makes it incredibly easy to view and share all types of files and business documents, like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Acrobat files, right in the browser through its integration. The embedded Box widget has a number of smart control features built in so you can page through documents, rotate and resize images, and switch in and out of full screen view all within UberConference.

Evernote is an awesome way for people to remember everything, and many ÜberConference users already use our feature for automatically saving call summaries to their Evernote account. With the new release of Evernote Business, it’s even easier to collaborate on shared business notes, and we are excited to be one of the first companies to develop an integration with this new functionality. We have also added in another smart, Related Notes function that Evernote offers, which will automatically find notes that you might want for the call based on the conference name and participants in the call.

If you haven’t signed up for a Box or Evernote account already, you should check them out now. New Box users can also get 10 GB of extra space if you sign up at www.box.com/UberConference

It was awesome to sponsor the Founder Showcase, one of the top Silicon Valley startup events. That’s where UberConference was last night, on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus down in Mountain View, CA.

The Founder Showcase began in 2009 as a small quarterly event but now has grown into a 500+ person extravaganza regularly attended by entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists. Startup founders can apply online to pitch at the next showcase in June.

This quarter’s Showcase taught startup attendees “The Future of Funding,” featuring smart, punchy talks by Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz (one of the companies that funded UberConference), andKeith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, on where venture funding has been, since the late ‘80s, and where it’s going.

As a growing startup ourselves, we like to support events like the Founder Showcase. We understand the difficulty it takes to manage and grow a business. That’s why we created UberConference: to help make it easier for communicate with your team, customers, and partners to get things done. It’s a great fit for startups who want a communication tool that provides a high quality experience while saving them money.

If you’re a startup that missed the event, you can use the promo code “showcase” (no quotes) to upgrade your account to Uberconference Pro – limit one code per startup.